Thank you Patrick. At 01:30 AM 6/28/98 -0700, Patrick W. Gilmore wrote:
At 10:28 AM 6/27/98 -0500, Karl Denninger wrote:
Proxies are fine WHERE CUSTOMERS HAVE AGREED TO THEIR USE.
STEALING someone's packet flow to force it through a proxy is NOT fine.
I think this is the heart of Karl's argument. (Karl, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.) The rest of the rant about how transparent caches, proxy server, etc. work and other opinions about how the Internet and web content will look in the future is ... not my concern at present.
Proxies not only intercept and redirect packets, they replace packets with older ones, rather and allowing a fresh packet to come through. There are many circumstances where this is unacceptable. Most contracts imply raw packet streams, unless specified otherwise. Filtering a raw packet stream is technically a breach of contract. If done to us, it will cause us to switch upstream providers, make us renumber our hosts, and cause us much grief/anxiety/emotional harm/lost business, which we will be glad to bill back to the upstream provider, in court if need be, at inflated values if we can get away with it.<grin> If our upstream provider is not the one directly doing it then *they* can forward our bill, tagging on their own expenses, to their upstream provider, and so on. By the time this little shit-ball hits the one doing the filtering, they may decide that sipping umbrella-drinks, on the beach, or collecting welfare, may be a better business model to persue.
But the original topic is of great concern to me. Is there one person on this list - even someone from DIGEX - who can give me one reason why altering the destination of a packet a customer paid you to deliver, without that customer's consent or foreknowledge, is in any way morally or ethically permissible? Hell, for that matter, is it even legal?
It can be considered simple contract breach (see above, I was not being facitious) with appropriate penalties for "willful failure to perform", aka fraud, possibly wire-fraud under the right circumstances. There's a whole range of civil and criminal law that are specifically designed to extract pounds of flesh, out of such perpetrators.
I know that when my downstreams pay me for transit and give me a packet, I do my damnedest to get that packet TO THE DESTINATION. If I can give my customers better service though proxy or caching or any other method, I will definitely OFFER it to them. (We are currently looking into transparent and other caching techniques, but have not begun such an offering as of yet.) However, I will not shirk my responsibility to deliver packets where the customer (rightfully) expects them to go without the customer's permission. I find it repugnant that one of my peers has done so. I would be interested in how other's feel about it - without all the discussion about whether caching is any use or not.
Agreed, I would offer such a value-added service, but not at the expense of a raw data-feed.
Karl Denninger (karl@MCS.Net)| MCSNet - Serving Chicagoland and Wisconsin
TTFN, patrick
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